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Practice in the Art Museum, 2001
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Within the institutional reality in which contemporary art predominately currently exists, a realm of art museums, art journals, art schools, art collectors etc., there is still an innate aversion to the agencing of practices in art that are founded on the complexities of social exchange. Thus the ‘art museum’ is represented as a context that defines a social environment that from the outside is to be looked up to as a symbol of transmissional authority, and from the inside operates as a modus operandi for society’s institutions that is increasingly at odds with the social processes of exchange that are actually shaping modern daily life.
It is in other areas of art activity, in other social environments in which art exists such as in educational art, community art, psychiatric art, that models of exchange in communication between people and the rich complexity that they generate are seen as valued practice. …But within the realm of the institutional art world these more mutualistic social practices in art are at best marginalised, if not excluded altogether as they are deemed to undermine the authoritative criteria of authorship and of ownership based on possession. And this is the crux of the problem for within these social practices there is an implicit divestment of authorship, and the emphasis on art practice being a process-based experience, a process in time, not contained in an immortalised object. But the point I wish to emphasise is that the way in which we approach an institutionalised space is all dependent on our starting point, ie. the physical environment may be beyond our capabilities to rebuild as we desire, but what we represent within it, how we use that space, can enable our psychological approach to change and embrace quite divergent ideologies and perceptions. For the space in reality is relative to how we enter it, what perceptual framework we bring to bear on the experience.
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3.)
The procedures of everyday creativity
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At the micro level, procedures of everyday creativity act on and redistribute a discursive space, raising a new and different set of problems. Once again, these strategies privilege a productive apparatus that short-circuits institutional directions. As such, the grid of “praxis” is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, where it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it. Popular procedures manipulate the mechanisms of “practice” and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what “ways of operating” form the counterpart, on the viewer’s side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order.
These “ways of operating” constitute the innumerable practices by which artists re-appropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production. They pose questions at once analogous and contrary to discursive structures and deflect their functioning by means of a multitude of “tactics.” These articulate the details of everyday life; the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity of groups or individuals already engaged in acts of “praxis.”
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4.)
The formal structure of practice
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It may be supposed that these operations—multiform and fragmentary, relative to situations and details, insinuated into and concealed within devices whose mode of usage they constitute, and thus lacking their own ideologies or institutions—conform to certain rules. In other words, there must be a logic of these practices. We are thus confronted once again by the ancient problem: What is an art or “way of making”? From the Greeks to Durkheim, a long tradition has sought to describe with precision the complex (and not at all simple or “impoverished”) rules that could account for these operations.’ From this point of view, “popular culture,” as well as a whole literature called “popular,”‘ take on a different aspect: they present themselves essentially as “arts of making” this or that, i.e., as combinatory or utilizing modes of consumption. These practices bring into play a “popular” ratio, a way of thinking invested in a way of acting, an art of combination which cannot be dissociated from an art of using. In order to grasp the formal structure of these practices, I have carried out two sorts of investigations. The first, more descriptive in nature, has concerned certain ways of making that were selected according to their value for the strategy of the analysis, and with a view to obtaining fairly differentiated variants: readers’ practices, practices related to urban spaces, utilizations of everyday rituals, re-uses and functions of the memory through the “authorities” that make possible (or permit) every-day practices, etc. In addition, two related investigations have tried to trace the intricate forms of the operations proper to the recompositon of a space (the Croix-Rousse quarter in Lyons) by familial practices, on the one hand, and on the other, to the tactics of the art of doing and making, which simultaneously organizes a network of relations, poetic ways of “making do,” and a re-use of marketing structures.’
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1.)
Shifting centers of interest and changing problematics
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[We] regard facts not as simple, une-quivocal truths but as complex things, assemblages of meanings, opinions, theories and actions that would have to be acknowledged for their ability to separate and divide as much as for their ability to form common platforms for seemingly inevitable decisions. [
Dingpolitik] – Heidegger recalled that the term
Ding originally referred to a form of archaic assembly, and, recently, Bruno Latour has latched onto this genealogy to redefine “things” in terms of “matters of concern” rather than “matters of fact,” as quasi-objects and quasi-subjects that fall between the two poles of this dichotomy. (Lütticken) If this doesn’t sound too contradictory, Latour has nicely framed the notion of “construction” under the rubric of “things,” which in old English and German denotes a space for negotiation, shifting centers of interest and problematics. a.) The method for determining the function, organization and “construction” of space inside a given social group comprises one of the most visible modalities of collective and individual practice — “The handling of space is one of the means to this end, and it is hardly astonishing that the [artist/curator] should be tempted to follow in reverse the route from space to the social, as if the latter had produced the former once and for all. This route is essentially “cultural” since, when it passes through the most visible, the most institutionalized signs, those most recognized by the social order, it simultaneously designates the place of the social order, defined by the same stroke as a common place.” …If [we] describe an objective bound to disciplinary or institutional constraints, like history, curatorial practice or the “book form,” then we do so without the intent to prove or favor one solution over another. Instead, [we] regard these practices in writing and research as a model for critical inquiry and creative exchange, where words (whether they produce a revolution or an aversion of the eyes) concretely bear upon choices and perceptions we make in material life. [Medea-Material]
2.)
Spencer’s model of geopolitics is rather sophisticated for his time. He argued that increases in the size of a social aggregate necessitate the elaboration of its structure. Such increases in size are the result of migrations and joining populations. Although Spencer visualized much growth as the result of compounding and recompounding—that is, successive joining together of previously separate social systems he also employed the concept of compounding in another sense: to denote successive stages of internal growth and differentiation of social systems. Throughout Principles of Sociology, a theory of geopolitics and labor is developed. The mechanistic theory of the division of labor implies that the public is the product of necessary causes, and not an end which by itself influences activity. As the social milieu extends, the collective conscience spreads itself over more and more concrete things, and, accordingly, becomes more abstract.
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3.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein compares, in a famous paragraph of his Philosophical Investigations, our language to an old town: its development can be traces back both to spontaneous generation and, though limited, to conscious planning. Wittgenstein writes of a labyrinth of narrow lanes and places, old and new houses, some of which have annexes from different times; and all this is surrounded by new suburbs where streets are symmetric and houses are uniform – likened to a contemporary metropolis appears as a linguistic formation, an environment that is above all constituted by objectivized discourse, by a pre-constructed code, and by a materialized grammar.
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4.)
The regulatory, the operative and the distributive
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Spencer employed the terms primary, secondary, and tertiary compounding, by which he meant that a society had undergone a qualitative shift in the level of differentiation from a simpler to a more complex form. These stages of compounding marked a new level of differentiation among and within what Spencer saw as the three main axes of differentiation in social systems: (1) the regulatory, in which structures, mobilizing and using power manage relations with the external environment, while engaging in internal coordination of a society’s members; (2) the operative, in which structures meet system needs for production of goods and commodities and for reproduction of system mem bers and their culture; and (3) the distributive, in which structures move materi als, people, and information. [
Forms-of-Life] “…In order to get clear about aesthetic words, situations and contexts you have to describe
ways of living.” [
35]
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1.)
“There is a certain sense in which we are wholly involved in metaphor and in which a small construct such as this — local to its context and wholly a one-off — may have some value also as a model, which will then be a model of address, of attitude and approach, rather than one of outcome or consequence. I do not want to strain its credibility further than that. [
We] hope however that by veering so alarmingly between the general and the particular, and between the realms of metaphor and practicality, [we] have suggested to you that every technical possibility has a wider equivalence, and a positive need to seek relationships with new and established content.”
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a.)
The arrangement of information offers a faithful image of social structures. The layout is diversified with respect to function. Information is highly integrated — structured around the tendency to accumulate, fill, close off and position the space of writing, research and display in practice. Each post has a corresponding role to various functions of the arrangement — each referring to a view which conceives of the individual as a balanced assemblage of distinct faculties.
—————————-It comes to this. / this whole aspect of newer problems. (We enter the area of the whole work, / into the FIELD, if you like, where all the values and all / the lines must be managed in their relations to each other.) / It is a matter, finally of OBJECTS. what they are [and] how they are used. / …Every element in an open work / (the line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense) / must be taken up as an object of reality, / creating tensions [in the work] just as totally as those other objects which create what we know as / the world. …It’s hard to see / but think of a sea condensed into a speck / And there are ways frequencies of light, others that may be heard / The one is one sea / the other a second / there are electric stresses across condensers that wear them down until they can stand no strain / Are of no force as unreclaimed as the bottom of the sea / Unless the space the stresses cross be air – that can be patched / Large and small condensers / passing in the one instance frequencies that can be turned to sound / And the other, alternations that can escape so many waves of a speck of sea / or what / or what / or a graph / the curve of a wave beyond all sound / an open circuit where no action like that of the retina / made human by light is recorded otherwise than having taken / a desired path a little way and though infinitely emote to be uncontained forever / This science is then like gathering flowers of the weed / One who works with me calls bird seed / That are tiny and many on one stem / they shed to the touch though on a par with a large flower / that picked will find a base / I see many things at one time the harder the concepts get / or nothing / which is a forever become me or over forty years / I’m like another and another / who has finished learning and has just begun to learn / if I turn pages back a child may as well be stirring with me wondering at the meaning I turn to last / perhaps
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2.)
The ‘discourse of information’
____—-corresponds to
____—-a structure of
____—-assembly that is always abstract
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3.)
The entire modern environment is thus transposed onto the level of a sign system, namely INFORMATION, which is Naturalization, concealment, superimposition, décor and context. …we are surrounded by information whose form comes into play as a false answer to the self-contradictory manner in which the object is experienced.
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-01.
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Treatise on Harmony
01.
BOOK ONE:
On the Relationship Between Harmonic Ratios and Proportions
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02.
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II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
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II.
III.
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IV.
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VII.
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36.
On the different ways in which the relationship between Sounds can be known to us 4
On the origin of Consonances and on their relationships 5
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On the source of Harmony or the fundamental Sound, 7
On the Unison, 8
On the Octave, 8
On the Fifth and the Fourth, 13
On the Thirds and the Sixths, 15
Summary of the contents of this Chapter, in which the properties shown in the
preceding Demonstration are represented on a single String, 17
Remarks on the properties of the Harmonic and Arithmetic Proportions 20
On the origin of Dissonances and on their relationships 27
On doubled Intervals, and especially on the Ninth and the Eleventh 34
On Harmonic Division, or on the origin of Chords 35
On the inversion of Chords 40
On the major Perfect Chord and on its derivatives, 40
On the minor Perfect Chord and on its derivatives, 42
On the Seventh Chord constructed by adding a minor Third to the major Perfect
Chord and on its derivatives, 42
On the Seventh Chord constructed by adding a minor Third to the minor Perfect
Chord and on its derivatives, 44
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On Composition in two Parts 317
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Thinking, doing, re-assessing, re-doing, re-considering, and then finally attempting to bring into being something that grasps the multiple realities encountered in the process of creating, and then aiming to situate the result within a transdisciplinary contextualized setting, in which the intimation and implication of design can be questioned and renegotiated as a socially responsive and critically aware act.
—————————-…The book was distributed to individuals with the command to rip out a page and distribute them. In this way, the pages are ripped out one by one, distributing the knowledge, and diminishing the book as an object. The intention with the performance, the book, and the deconstruction of the book itself, was to create a discourse monument. The act of constructing an alternative discourse through interaction and dialogue symbolically represents the process of an alternative discourse being monumentalized. The monument therefore, lies not in the book itself, but in the production and reproduction of discourse surrounding it.
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2.)
Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi
Negotiating National Belonging, Discourse Monument
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2009
3.)
The book is based on a four-hour interview, and illustrates the personal conflict of feeling proud of a pacifist choice, but equally guilty for not fulfilling the requirements of a ‘good Israeli citizen’. The form of the book emphasizes the individual negotiation process of positioning ones sense of national belonging to Israeli society, as he shifts back and forth between feeling proud and guilty, within the interview.
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